Can Luis Suarez Return To Glory After Becoming The World's Most Infamous Biter?

Who will Luis Suarez bite next? The toothy Uruguayan is about to make his debut for Barcelona, most likely in the “clasico” against eternal rivals Real Madrid on October 25, after his four-month ban for biting Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini at the World Cup. Already the bookmakers are taking bets on his next victim. The Irish bookie Paddy Power thinks it’s most likely to be Madrid’s terrifying defender Pepe, followed by Pepe’s teammates Sergio Ramos and Cristiano Ronaldo. Fourth in the betting comes Lionel Messi: if Suarez bites him, Paddy Power will pay the prescient gambler $40 for every $1 staked. And if you bet on Suarez to bite Sepp Blatter or Queen Elizabeth first and it happens, your $1 bet will pay out $1000. One caveat, adds the bookmaker: the bite “must happen live on TV during a competitive game for either his club or Uruguay.”

Leaving aside the Queen for a moment, it’s all too plausible a scenario. In every match Suarez plays for the rest of his career, opponents will take the field primed to provoke him. It’s quite thinkable that he will go down in Barcelona’s history as the $110 million blunder, especially as he’s just 15 months away from turning 29 — old for a striker. But despite everything, the bet must be that Suarez will pay off for Barça. In fact the Catalans might just have assembled the most exciting forward line in the history of club soccer since Real in the 1950s.

We haven’t heard much from Suarez since that bite of Chiellini — his third biting victim in professional soccer, after PSV Eindhoven’s Otman Bakkal in 2010 and Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic in 2013. Bitegate proved the first great iconic moment of the World Cup (later surpassed only by Brazil-Germany 1-7) and its aftermath exposed one of Suarez’s great problems. Whatever the most famous living Uruguayan does, his compatriots support him — and that makes it harder for him to reform. After his handball in 2010, the great Uruguayan writer on soccer and literature, Eduardo Galeano, said Suarez had sacrificed himself for his country. After Suarez was accused of racially abusing Manchester United’s Patrice Evra in 2012, even Uruguay’s president Jose Mujica defended him.

After Bitegate, Uruguay’s captain Diego Lugano accused Chiellini of “crying,” and added: “As a man he disappointed me totally.” The team’s coach, Oscar Tabarez, when asked about the bite by journalists, replied: “I want to say that if he's attacked, as it has begun in this press conference, we'll also defend him, because this is a soccer World Cup, not of cheap morality."

Most of the Uruguayan media also took Suarez’s side over the bite. El Observador newspaper said of the apparent toothmarks on Chiellini, “It could just be a mole.” The website of the TV station Tenfield blamed the fuss on an English conspiracy. Tenfield took the opportunity to say that Geoff Hurst’s shot for England in the 1966 World Cup final had not crossed the West German line.

It’s not simply that some Uruguayans struggle with the notion that their beloved Luisito — brilliant player and family man — sometimes sins. It’s also that some Uruguayans conflate his transgressions with his much admired competitiveness. So they don’t condemn him, and so he seems to have struggled to accept that he really needs to change. The consequence: he is a great player with an unfulfilled career. He has dropped out of two straight World Cups as villain of the show, and his first match for Barcelona, aged nearly 28, will also be his first for a great club.

For him, Barcelona is almost like home. When his childhood sweetheart Sofia emigrated from Uruguay in her teens, this is the city she moved to. When he moved to Holland soon after, he’d regularly fly to Barcelona for visits. It’s a coastal city like Montevideo, with a very similar climate.

Yet he’s not a natural fit with the club. FC Barcelona values good behaviour. Another bad boy, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, noticed during his one year there that men like Messi and Xavi are great players but not stars: they go around in tracksuits, not in designer clothing, listen to the coach and generally behave. Similarly, Suarez marvelled, after a visit to Barça’s Masía youth academy: “It was all a big surprise to me, especially how well the children behave.” Indeed, many local fans and media were disquieted when the club signed him so soon after the Chiellini episode. And he had that four-month suspension.